And Alcide threw his arms about like the semaphore at Portsmouth Dockyard, at the risk of breaking everything within a radius of six feet of him. “If the firing-point were known I could soon find the great circles in which the alteration will be zero, and the places where it will reach the maximum, so as to give folks notice to clear out and save themselves from being smashed by their houses tumbling about their ears! But how am I to know that firing-point?” And he ran his fingers through the very little hair that had been left him. “The results of the shock may be much more complicated than they imagine! Why should not the volcanoes take the opportunity to favour us with a few disorderly eruptions, and, like a first voyager, displace some of the matter in their insides? Why should not the uplifted ocean take a header into some of the craters? There’s a chance for you! That would give an explosion that might send the whole tellurian box of tricks sky high, or rather sky higher! What do you say to that, you confounded Maston? you obstinate mute! What do you mean by juggling with our poor Earth as if it were a ball on a billiard-table?” These alarming hypotheses of Sulphuric Alcide were taken up and discussed by the newspapers all over the world. The pyrotechnic display organized by Barbicane and Co. would end in waterspouts, tidal waves, deluges, would it? But such catastrophes would only be partial! Thousands of people would disappear, and the rest would hardly notice anything worth mentioning! As the fatal day approached, fear came over the bravest. It might have been the dreadful year 1000 from the way in which the people generally conducted themselves. What happened in that year 1000 it may be interesting to recall. Owing to a passage in the Apocalypse, the people of Europe were persuaded that the Day of Judgment was nigh. They waited for the signs of wrath; the son of Perdition, Antichrist, was to be revealed. “In the last year of the tenth century,” relates H. Martin, “everything was interrupted—pleasures, business, interest, even the work in the fields. ‘Why,’ said the people, ‘should we provide for a future that will never come? Let us think of eternity, which will begin to-morrow.’ They provided only for their immediate needs; they handed over their lands and castles to the monasteries to obtain their protection in the kingdom in the skies which was about to come to them. Many of the deeds of gift to the churches begin with the words, ‘The end of the world approaching, and its ruin being imminent.’ When the end of the fatal term arrived the people kept within the basilicas, the chapels, the edifices consecrated to God, and waited in agony for the seven trumpets of the seven angels of judgment to sound in the sky.”